USB Hard Drive not accessible in Explorer

[Guest]

Hello,
This message is similar to the previous post about devices not showing up in
Explorer, however I am not sure if it is really the same issue or not...

I have a USB Hard Drive that I recently reformatted using Partition Magic
7.0. Before reformatting the drive, the file system was NTSB and the drive
worked fine, however I formatted it because I would like to be able to plug
it into my Mac so I changed it to FAT32. Now the drive will not work on
either computer.

If I go to the Device Manager, the hard drive is listed there - however it
does not show up in Explorer, so I can not read/write to it, nor can I
reformat it back to NTSB because Partition Magic does not see the drive.

I'm not sure what to even search for to find help on this subject, so any
advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks very much!!

-sharon

 

[Nathan McNulty]

First, make sure you have tried assigning the drive a letter in Disk
Management (Right click on My Computer, click Manage, click Disk
Management).

If this is a self made external hard drive, you can try taking it out of
the case, connect it internally, then format it whatever you like and
put it back in. If it was bought as an external, you should have some
software that came with the drive that you can use to format it.

As for it not showing up in Explorer, that is usually a registry entry
that is messed up. See if you can reformat it FAT32, then try assigning
it a drive letter in Disk Management (Right click on My Computer, click
Manage, click Disk Management).